Advertise here: Contact FM.

That's a nice sperm sac
April 30, 2008 8:08 AM Subscribe

Fugu, derived from fuku (to blow), is one of the more infamous meals you can order, celebrated in haiku and pop culture. It's popular enough, however, that there are "farms" raising 10,000 tons of blowfish the Japanese consume each year. Adam Platt, the latest American to document the dish, dines out on fugu six ways: fugu sashimi, fried fugu ribs, hot fugu porridge, smoked fugu fins, and two variations of "white babies".

The sperm sac is the only internal organ of the fugu that isn't poisonous, even the eyes of the fish are deadly when eaten. The special appeal of the shira-ko (beyond the obviously sexual) is the extra care required by the chef, since, when not fully engorged, the sperm sac looks uncannily like a set of the deadly fugu ovaries. It is, the chef says, "an acquired taste."

posted by CheeseDigestsAll (46 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite

I had some Fugu, pretty dang tasty :)
posted by zeoslap at 8:14 AM on April 30, 2008

The fugu is also a model organism for researchers. It's genome is about an eighth of the size of the human genome, but it contains a similar number of genes to the number we have. It's DNA is also rather nonrepetitive which makes ideal for study. More here. Fugu (fugus? what's the plural?) are cool.
posted by bluefly at 8:18 AM on April 30, 2008

I couldn't eat fugu; puffers are just way too cute to be food.
posted by quin at 8:19 AM on April 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

Ate it once -- the taste was ordinary, the neurological effects unnoticeable. The price, on the other hand, was spectacular. The lawyer who dared me to eat it paid the bill, fortunately.
posted by escabeche at 8:30 AM on April 30, 2008

ha ha, quin: I was just about to say "they're too cute"! I was totally enchanted by those tanks outside the restaurants with the fugu in them... I'd rather buy one and see if they'd put it in a bucket for me so I could take it home as a pet.
posted by vorfeed at 8:32 AM on April 30, 2008

...and the one-time novelty of eating a poisonous fish doesn't explain its repeat clientèle.

It does if it ends up being a one-time novelty.
posted by hal9k at 8:38 AM on April 30, 2008

From the pop culture link: ...The apprentice walks up to the car and interrupts them, telling the master chef that he is needed in the kitchen. But the master chef tells the apprentice that whatever it is, that he has to do it.

That totally spoils a great line.
posted by anthill at 8:42 AM on April 30, 2008

What escabeche said. Mild, white fish. The fugu fin steeped in sake was pretty good, too. I attribute the effects there to drinking a half-pint of sake.
posted by fixedgear at 8:42 AM on April 30, 2008

Correction: 10,000 tons is the total annual consumption of fugu, only a portion of that is farm-raised.

In fact, the farmed fugu has a bad reputation. In addition to inferior taste, in 2003 over a million farm-raised fugu had to be destroyed after local cooperatives admitted to dumping formalin (formaldehyde) into the floating sea-cages in an attempt to kill parasites.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:43 AM on April 30, 2008

That was a really good article. It's interesting that it seems like it's more than the taste that keeps people coming back for more fugu.
posted by ob at 8:44 AM on April 30, 2008

"Poison... Poison... TASTY FISH!"
posted by Thoth at 8:47 AM on April 30, 2008

I'm surprised at the maturity so far displayed by the comments with "fuki" "blow" and "sperm" all in the same post.

FOR SHAME!
posted by DU at 8:51 AM on April 30, 2008

They actually make fantastic pets, vorfeed. They are like little, spiky, wet, puppies. In time, they learn to recognize who is the bringer of food, and will, very enthusiastically, rub up against the glass trying to compel you with sweetness to give them more.

I've also seen them sleep all curled up in a ball, which is just absurdly awesome for a fish.

Unfortunately, they are also some serious predators and you have to keep them in a tank with other hunter fish, or they will devour everything.
posted by quin at 8:53 AM on April 30, 2008 [2 favorites]

Fugu (fugus? what's the plural?)

Fugu. Japanese doesn't have a plural, and so Japanese loan words that haven't gotten pretty damned comfy tend* to stick with the root form instead of getting an english +s for plurals. Consider "look at all those samurai!" vs. "look at all those Toyotas!"

^*totally, irresponsibly anecdotal assertion, don't quote me
posted by cortex at 8:56 AM on April 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

I'm surprised at the maturity so far displayed by the comments with "fuki" "blow" and "sperm" all in the same post.

Yes, and despite the bland taste and fear of deadly consequences, they all swallow.

Famous Last Line from Culinary Notebook from Hell:

“Ha, ha, ha, ha,” laughs Shinji. He’s amused by my predicament, and already a little drunk on sperm sac.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:09 AM on April 30, 2008

When I lived in Japan, I ate most of my meals at a local shokuji. One day, I casually asked the owner about fugu, and he showed me his yellowing license with a picture of a much younger man. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this dude, who lived on a podunk island and ran a restaurant with a total of eight seats was licensed to cut fugu. I told him I'd like to try it, and he asked me how much I wanted. Having no idea about the cost, I tossed out 5000 yen as an amount I'd be willing to spend. Though this is a lot more than I typically spend on dinner, it was my last night in Japan and I'd heard that fugu was super expensive.

When my last night arrived, I went to the shokuji and sat down. The owner brought me a plate of fugu sashimi. I ate the fish, and was surprised that it tasted as bland as it did. I was expecting a flavor explosion, but really it was pretty mild and extremely chewy. I got up to leave, thinking that I had probably wasted forty bucks. The owner told me to sit back down, and proceeded to bring me several more courses of fugu, including fried nuggets, smoked fish, fugu stew, and fugu nigirizushi.

As I was eating, I started to feel extremely strange. My extremities began to tingle, and I was overcome with a mild euphoria. It felt kind of like a mix between MDMA and PCP.

After I finished eating, the owner told me that he had a granddaughter about my age. (At this point I should probably mention that all of our conversations were in Japanese, and that my Japanese is pretty shaky at best). He said that his granddaughter was a model and an actress, and offered to show me a DVD. I happily agreed, and he put on a movie. It featured the man's granddaughter, a young and attractive Japanese woman, dressed in a bathing suit, frolicking on the beach, in a schoolgirl uniform, playing on a playground, and various other costumes. While it wasn't explicitly pornographic, this movie was clearly designed for masturbatory purposes. The guy was super proud of his model/actress granddaughter, and invited me to her upcoming birthday party (which I unfortunately was unable to attend).

It would have been an extremely awkward situation had I not been so high on fish.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 9:17 AM on April 30, 2008 [29 favorites]

Ceiling Fugu is disappointed in you.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:27 AM on April 30, 2008

Ah, Japanese food. I have fond memories of a friend spinning a tale of his night spent eating with Japanese monks (Buddhist? Shinto? can't recall) and how they had him dine on, among various other things, a still-beating frog's heart.

Can't wait to get there and see what foods they try to feed this crazy foreigner.
posted by splice at 9:47 AM on April 30, 2008

I had it once and am convinced it either contains, or creates once ingested, some sort of drug-like effect similar to an opiate. Certainly one doesn't eat it for the taste (it had none) and the one-time novelty of eating a poisonous fish doesn't explain its repeat clientèle.
The reason fugu is so popular is that it gives you a tingling feeling on your tongue. This is because its skin and organs contain the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin which blocks sodium channels in nerves. The reason fugu chefs have to be so well trained is that they need to leave just enough of the neurotoxin to give you that tingling feeling and not so much that you die.
posted by peacheater at 9:54 AM on April 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

(Besides, we don't say "trouts" or "salmons" or "sturgeons", so my speculation aobut the influence of the lack of a Japanese plural suffix probably isn't even the key thing! And does this lack-of-s trend in English fish plurals have anything to do with the fact that the category word "fish" has, itself, the plural form of "fish"? Or are these just parallel phenomena? I don't know! Continue not quoting me!)
posted by cortex at 10:05 AM on April 30, 2008 [2 favorites]

They actually make fantastic pets, vorfeed. They are like little, spiky, wet, puppies. In time, they learn to recognize who is the bringer of food, and will, very enthusiastically, rub up against the glass trying to compel you with sweetness to give them more.

I've also seen them sleep all curled up in a ball, which is just absurdly awesome for a fish.

Man, now I really want one. Too bad those saltwater tanks seem pretty complicated -- I can barely handle a normal fishtank. And I would probably die of shame if I killed a cute lil' pet fugu!
posted by vorfeed at 10:11 AM on April 30, 2008

And I would probably die of shame if I killed a cute lil' pet fugu!

If the shame alone didn't take you out, you could just eat your deceased pet and end it all that way. How convenient!
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:31 AM on April 30, 2008

Swim away Fugu Fish!
posted by jlowen at 10:43 AM on April 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

This is a myth.

Most Japanese fugu is farmed. Farmed fugu is not poisonous - fugu are very nervous fish that nibble on coral and rocks to (if you can believe it) relieve stress, and this is how they collect poison in their livers. Fugu farmers cut the beaks of their fish off, preventing them from nibbling on their sea cages, and so 99.9% of the fugu Japanese people eat is not poisonous at all.

The town where I lived in Japan has a healthy farmed fugu industry, and I interviewed members of the local fishing co-op and fugu farmers for some magazine writing.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:56 AM on April 30, 2008

Ah, Japanese food. I have fond memories of a friend spinning a tale of his night spent eating with Japanese monks (Buddhist? Shinto? can't recall) and how they had him dine on, among various other things, a still-beating frog's heart.

I'll bet you some yen they weren't Buddhists.

We were in Japan a couple of weeks ago -- my first time, I loved it -- and at one spectacular and very un-PC meal, we ate Noah's ark:

raw horsemeat sashimi
raw beef
grilled lamb with onions
grilled wild game bird with yuzu-chili dipping sauce (dayamn!)
frogs' legs
deep-fried whale (for which I will pay with 10,000 gruesome rebirths in Pittsburgh, though we were told it was "not an endangered species of whale" -- tasted like chicken, for the record)
rabbit

and several other species of sentient beings, but I forget the rest, because we washed it all down with some kind of liqueur made from an Okinawan citrus fruit the name of which escapes me. Yum!
posted by digaman at 11:05 AM on April 30, 2008

two variations of "white babies".

Eating white babies is legal now? Ha! Looks like I'm once again ahead of the curve!
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:05 AM on April 30, 2008

allow me to be the first to say - fan-fugu-tastic!
posted by fingers_of_fire at 11:22 AM on April 30, 2008

Fugu farmers cut the beaks of their fish off, preventing them from nibbling on their sea cages, and so 99.9% of the fugu Japanese people eat is not poisonous at all.

Must have been pretty ineffective since their beaks grow constantly. Some in captivity even need dentistry to keep their teeth trimmed down.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 11:27 AM on April 30, 2008

Vorfeed, if saltwater is too scary, you could always go with freshwater puffers. Might I suggest dwarf puffers. Too small to eat, but still insanely cute. They get no bigger than a quarter, and that's a big one.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 11:33 AM on April 30, 2008

I cannot see her tonight.
I have to give her up
So I will eat fugu.

-Yosa Buson
posted by turing_test at 11:35 AM on April 30, 2008

So I will eat fugu.

The extreme version of eating humble pie.
posted by ob at 12:22 PM on April 30, 2008

The real culinary rage in Japan these days is cosplay yakiniku and maid sushi (story in Japanese only, sorry).
I don't know what she is doing to the guy's ear in the second photo, but it cost him a 1000 yen extra.
posted by sour cream at 12:25 PM on April 30, 2008

Besides, we don't say "trouts" or "salmons" or "sturgeons", so my speculation aobut the influence of the lack of a Japanese plural suffix probably isn't even the key thing!

Yeah, I thought about carp and tuna after I posted. Maybe it's a fish thing.
posted by bluefly at 1:49 PM on April 30, 2008

Fugu. Japanese doesn't have a plural, and so Japanese loan words that haven't gotten pretty damned comfy tend* to stick with the root form instead of getting an english +s for plurals.

'Fugus' is also an acceptable plural, as are 'tunas', 'sturgeons', 'salmons', and 'trouts'. 'Sheeps' and 'mooses' aren't, though.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 2:03 PM on April 30, 2008

Acceptable in the sense that (a) an English speaker can figure out what you're talking about and (b) there are certain contexts where it may even make sense to use +s, but "look at the tunas" isn't something I think anybody would call grammatical in common usage.
posted by cortex at 2:12 PM on April 30, 2008

Yes, the correct plural form of moose is 'meese'.
posted by quin at 2:13 PM on April 30, 2008

No, acceptable in the sense that they're correct even if they're uncommon.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 2:20 PM on April 30, 2008

Fugu farmers cut the beaks of their fish off, preventing them from nibbling on their sea cages, and so 99.9% of the fugu Japanese people eat is not poisonous at all.

Must have been pretty ineffective since their beaks grow constantly. Some in captivity even need dentistry to keep their teeth trimmed down.

I think the solution when farming fugu is to eat them. Seriously, the fugu you eat don't have the chance to develop toxins. Juvenile fugu are usually trucked to fish farms around Japan from Sasebo, in Nagasaki. So, the young fish arrive with their beaks intact. A few weeks or perhaps a couple of months later the beaks are clipped. Several months later (before they can chew enough to become poisonous) they are eaten.
posted by KokuRyu at 3:08 PM on April 30, 2008

"Mr. Simpson, you must not eat another bite!"
"I couldn't possibly!"
posted by evilcolonel at 3:42 PM on April 30, 2008

... in 2003 over a million farm-raised fugu had to be destroyed after local cooperatives admitted to dumping formalin (formaldehyde) into the floating sea-cages in an attempt to kill parasites.

According to the FDA formaldehyde is approved here in the U.S. for the control of:

external protozoa (Chilodonella, Costia, Epistylis, Ichthyophthirius, Scyphidia, and Trichodina spp.) and the monogenetic trematodes (Cleidodiscus, Dactylogyrus, and Gyrodactylus spp.) on all finfish,

fungi of the family Saprolegniaceae on all finfish eggs, and

protozoan parasites (Bodo, Epistylis, and Zoothamnium spp.) on penaeid shrimp.

external protozoa and monogenetic trematodes (as above) on salmon, trout, catfish, largemouth bass, and bluegill, and

fungi (as above) on salmon, trout, and esocid eggs.

It's supposed to be veterinary grade, as industrial grade may hurt the fish.
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:04 PM on April 30, 2008

"Master! We need your skilled hands in the kitchen!"
"My skilled hands are busy!"
posted by anthill at 5:06 PM on April 30, 2008

Yeah, I could never eat puffers because they are SO CUTE OMIGOSH. I might get dwarf puffers when I next have a tank free and don't immediately feel the urge for another betta, because the tank requirements for 1 betta and 1 dwarf puffer are about the same.

So, my dad ate fugu once at a business dinner, and he told me it wasn't all that special but there was a great deal of amusement for him the next morning. See, he got a call early the next morning at his hotel to the tune of (translate this mentally into business-executive-Japanese), "Mr. Bettafish, are you all right?! Have you been feeling ill?"

"Oh, I'm fine! Has something happened?"

It turned out that one of the dinner guests had fallen ill. Unrelated stomach bug, but you can imagine that the hosts FREAKED OUT.
posted by bettafish at 5:15 PM on April 30, 2008

sour cream, she's cleaning his ears.

yep, you can pay a costumed woman (I've yet to hear of a man performing the same service for women) to groom you in this most personal, and, let's face it, potentially deadly, fashion. I mean the method...not the costume. it sounds insane to me, but I have had several men tell me it is amazing to be that exposed and trusting of another person.

KokuRyu...I have to admit I'm stunned by your assertions that the fugu themselves are not lethal. Granted, I live in a thoroughly land-locked area, so my access to the intimate details of the fishing subculture are limited to the local yanas. This sort of mass-misinformation is totally believable, though, and I would bet large sums of yen that my students have no idea that the farmed fugu is toxin-free.

It sure does explain a lot about the regular appearance of blowfish on the menus of local restaurants that appear to have passed health codes by questionable means. I've never ordered it at a dive, but often wondered how it could possibly be edible.
posted by squasha at 5:32 PM on April 30, 2008

Here's more information on the neurotoxin. It seems that the fugu might not actually have a gene which codes for a pathway to produce the poison. Evidence suggests that bacteria that live inside the fish produces it. Maybe this is why fugu bred in captivity don't have as much of the toxin because they don't eat/come into contact with this bacteria.
posted by bluefly at 6:14 PM on April 30, 2008

« Older Comedian Julie Klausner (of "Hot Jewish Girls... | DARPA has announced the contra... Newer »

This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments

That's a nice sperm sac April 30, 2008 8:08 AM Subscribe

That's a nice sperm sac
April 30, 2008 8:08 AM Subscribe